


Orpheus

by Lasertits



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universes, Love Conquers Death, M/M, Mycelial Network, Time Travel, Unsafe science, With Science!, do not try at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 23:25:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13669479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasertits/pseuds/Lasertits
Summary: Paul Stamets goes to get his man back.





	Orpheus

  
The first law of thermodynamics states that no energy is ever lost, it only changes form.

 

Order, for example in the shape of a doctor with a great ass and poor taste in music, becomes disorder; cells to molecules, molecules to atoms, that vanish into other constellations of matter.

The heat generated by said doctor’s biological processes, now ceased, beating heart, now still, radiates away and scatters into space. But does not die.

If you ask physics, Hugh Culbert lives forever.

 

This is all well and good. Paul’s scientist friends have sent similar condoleances to him. His favourite so far is a huge equation proving (somewhat dubiously, but it’s the thought that counts) that this universe will reboot at the end of time, identical in every way to its previous incarnation, and Hugh will live again.

Which, yes, he appreciates the effort, but it is simply not enough.

The best remedy for grief is, logically, to not have to grieve at all.

 

——

Building a personal spore drive from scratch is not as challenging as it should be.

  
Paul has an advantage now; a kind of strong intuition telling him when he is on the right track versus when he is absofuckinglutely wrong. It is as if his tardigrade DNA knows the way back to the network.

He has access to a limited amount of spores already, because he and it are symbiotic now, and he actually needs it to live. A medication, if you will.

It is not difficult to get a little more, and then a lot more.

  
—-

So, there he lies on the bed in a luxury hotel, where he is meant to take a dreadful vacation. Where, in fact, he has done nothing but overeat junk food, destroy every home video disc he brought with him (sorry Hugh), and fiddle with his backyard, scrapheap piece of highly experimental tech.

He estimates it is about as safe as a D.I.Y. fusion reactor, but hey, science isn’t for cowards.

  
—-

The first jump into a parallell universe is a bust.

 

The whole thing is a red-gold mess of boiling matter, subjected to laws of physics entirely its own, and it nearly rips him apart before he can flee into the network.

In the second, Earth never evolved life and is now inhabited by vast, bickering mechanical beings.

The tenth has Evil Hugh, who is smoking hot, he’d bang that like a hurricane in a screen door if it weren’t for the murder eyes and the giant sword, I mean why, he’s a doctor in that universe too. Why a sword.

The fortyfirst almost has his Hugh, and he died six months before Paul got there.

 

The fiftieth, sixtieth, seventieth, eightieth, ninetieth, nintyninth. All duds.

 

  
The hundreth, he travels in time. He appears in a nondescript corridor on a lower deck and the date, oh God the date and the time, because it is his own universe and in seven minutes Hugh will die in medbay, and Paul is a slow runner.

  
He arrives on the scene just as Ash breaks his lover’s neck, and he runs towards them and -jumps-, or he thinks he does but it’s completely involuntary, and it should be physically impossible to do that. There is a sideways wrenching feeling, and something like a vast impenetrable barrier stretching out of sight, and he jumps -again-, and...

 

——

It’s white, whatever the place is. Bright milky white and filled with an ear-piercing ringing noise that seems ready to shatter his skull, and it is shock full of a sense of wrong, danger, get out. He is not welcome there.

But his tardigrade DNA knows the way back to the network.

More than that. It knows the network that connects Paul Stamets to the world around him, the intricate flow of matter through him, the complicated web of influence that binds him to his colleagues, to his friends, strangers in passing, and to the man he loves with all that he is, and whom he can and will find unerringly in any world where he exists.

 

  
He gropes blindly in the whiteness, which is like air but has a repulsively unnatural sort of texture to it, and he finds something more solid there.

He stubbornly ignores his insticts which are screaming at him to let it go, let it go right now, DO NOT TOUCH, and he holds on and makes that weird shimmying sideways jump, only backwards.

 

——

Bright milky white. Bright. Ear-piercing ringing noise. Shrill. Da. Danger get out. Out now. Get.

Ge

Ou

 

  
—-

He comes to with a deep breath in, like someone diving without oxygen, breaching the surface after five minutes, ten, deep in the darkness and silence. No, like someone being born, because he breathes in so he can scream.

  
—

 

  
Paul

  
—-

 

  
”Paul?”

”Can you hear me?”

 

  
”Paul?”

 

That thrice-damned aria. That’s what it is, the ringing in his ears. Only played at the wrong frequency and speed and entirely too loud. Loud enough to deafen, and yet he has no trouble hearing his name.

 

His hotel room.

His burnt out D.I.Y. spore drive.

His stacks of old takeaway containers, his dirty sheets, his scattered datapads full of calculations. The sounds of traffic coming through the window and someone who could not be there according to every law of physics Paul knows, even the weirder ones.

 

Who nonetheless is here, alive.

  
”It almost sounds better this way”, he croaks, and Hugh, who’s leaning over him with his hand in a vice grip, knits his brows in confusion.

 

 

——

 


End file.
